Xavier
@Xavier@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts 8 months ago:
Honestly, I am embarrassed with the whole “look like were doing something” shtick by my government. An expensive gathering of decision makers from various sectors, a National Summit, just to say: we are now gonna be soooo tough on crime and let’s ban the toy we just saw on TikTok.
Car theft was a major problem before 2010 until engine immobilizers became mandatory since 2007 on all vehicles made in Canada
Then everyone got too comfortable. The regulatory bodies and car manufacturers were too focused pretending doing some work and publishing all the buzzword-of-the-day “accomplishments” they were doing while patting each others backs without explicitely requiring manufacturers to comply/implement immediately anything. Meanwhile, manufacturers were happy to integrate almost off-the-shelf “children’s RC” car starter pack obfuscated through invisible/non-existent security and protected under dubious industrial secrets.
Obviously, criminals smelled the easy money. Starting around 2013 — mystery car unlocking device | 2015 — signal repeater car burglary, car thefts by relay attacks were known by automakers but ignored as one-offs, too technical, already dealt with by law enforcement to lets pretent it’s not that big of a problem or leave it to the police. Meanwhile, insurance claim replacement vehicles are selling like hotcakes and it is “convenient” to ignore the problem.
The following years various reprogramming theft become known and finally CAN bus injection — new form of keyless car theft that works in under 2 minutes or in depth investigation by Dr. Ken Tindell, becomes so easy, so cheap and widely available that even kids uses them to gain Youtube/TikTok followers.
Car hacking was a becoming serious concern during the pandemic, but now it’s simply ridiculous and as if current automaker included/provided anti-theft/GPS tracking were (un)knowingly made “defective”.
Hence, everyone is playing catch up and blaming left and right on who is responsible for this in-slow-motion public safety disaster.
Brian Kingston, president and CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, which includes Ford Motor Company of Canada, General Motors of Canada and Stellantis, said increasing the risk of prosecution is the most effective way to deter vehicle theft.
“And at the same time, providing more outbound inspection controls at the ports to prevent the flow of stolen vehicles to foreign markets by organized criminal organizations,” he added.
New vehicle safety standards have been published (rushed?) recently. We will see if all the panic settles down like after 2007.
Moreover, the exponential prevalence of car theft also laid bare the incredibly poor and ineffective security at the various ports of Canada. Unsurprisingly, it has been a known constant devolution:
(Reposting my same reply for a similar thread about the Canadian Government banning the Flipper Zero, please check my post history for the other thread)
- Comment on Canada declares Flipper Zero public enemy No. 1 in car-theft crackdown 8 months ago:
Honestly, I am embarrassed with the whole “look like were doing something” shtick by my government. An expensive gathering of decision makers from various sectors, a National Summit, just to say: we are now gonna be soooo tough on crime and let’s ban the toy we just saw on TikTok.
Car theft was a major problem before 2010 until engine immobilizers became mandatory since 2007 on all vehicles made in Canada
Then everyone got too comfortable. The regulatory bodies and car manufacturers were too focused pretending doing some work and publishing all the buzzword-of-the-day “accomplishments” they were doing while patting each others backs without explicitely requiring manufacturers to comply/implement immediately anything. Meanwhile, manufacturers were happy to integrate almost off-the-shelf “children’s RC” car starter pack obfuscated through invisible/non-existent security and protected under dubious industrial secrets.
Obviously, criminals smelled the easy money. Starting around 2013 — mystery car unlocking device | 2015 — signal repeater car burglary, car thefts by relay attacks were known by automakers but ignored as one-offs, too technical, already dealt with by law enforcement to lets pretent it’s not that big of a problem or leave it to the police. Meanwhile, insurance claim replacement vehicles are selling like hotcakes and it is “convenient” to ignore the problem.
The following years various reprogramming theft become known and finally CAN bus injection — new form of keyless car theft that works in under 2 minutes or in depth investigation by Dr. Ken Tindell, becomes so easy, so cheap and widely available that even kids uses them to gain Youtube/TikTok followers.
Car hacking was a becoming serious concern during the pandemic, but now it’s simply ridiculous and as if current automaker included/provided anti-theft/GPS tracking were (un)knowingly made “defective”.
Hence, everyone is playing catch up and blaming left and right on who is responsible for this in-slow-motion public safety disaster.
Brian Kingston, president and CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, which includes Ford Motor Company of Canada, General Motors of Canada and Stellantis, said increasing the risk of prosecution is the most effective way to deter vehicle theft.
“And at the same time, providing more outbound inspection controls at the ports to prevent the flow of stolen vehicles to foreign markets by organized criminal organizations,” he added.
New vehicle safety standards have been published (rushed?) recently. We will see if all the panic settles down like after 2007.
Moreover, the exponential prevalence of car theft also laid bare the incredibly poor and ineffective security at the various ports of Canada. Unsurprisingly, it has been a known constant devolution:
- Comment on Microsoft revives aggressive Windows 11 upgrade campaign with intrusive popups for Windows 10 users 9 months ago:
Usually, I help family and friends setup their computer to something familiar/similar to their routine (especially those that do everything in their browser). Otherwise, I let them slowly adapt to some new alternative software for their case use by preconfiguring it with them.
Generally, I recommend Linux Mint for those that are used to the Windows “feel”.
Guide: Linux Mint Installation Guide
Video: Linux Mint 21.3 (Wayland) Install Guide Note: I have not watched the whole video, I just quickly skipped around to see if they made sense.
Ideally, try to get a relative or friend who already use some flavor of Linux to sit down with you and help you get going with the transition, guaranteed they would be overjoyed. It’ll help avoid some obvious pitfall/mistake depending on your expertise level on IT stuff and streamline the experience by sharing knowledge.
- Comment on Bluesky opens to public registration 9 months ago:
I’ll skip. Just like how I skipped AOL, MySpace, LiveJournal, 4Chan, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Bebo, Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, Blogger, Google+, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, Quora, Twitch, YouTube, Vine, Netflix, OkCupid, Tinder, Grindr, Bumble, Discord, TikTok… oh all of the Apple ecosystem, and many other I missed by being oblivious or simply never heard of…
I liked the Slashdot, Digg, Reddit and now the Lemmy format/style. Will continue to move on to whatever I find stupid simple and publicly accessible I guess. I am naturally lazy, advertisement averse and hate having to provide personal info just to use something non-governmental or non-essential.
Now, with the increasing prevalence of LLM based bots, I will probably ineluctably reduce my time spent posting anything (I certainly hope it doesn’t get that bad, only time will tell) on any kind of “social media” and focus on current and new family, friends, coworkers, colleagues and acquaintances.
- Comment on Which OS do you use for your homeserver? 9 months ago:
Yes, 😅. Thank you for letting me know.
I typed correctly I’m pretty sure, but typing it again now it autocorrects to “C - C - P” now 🫤. Even more confused.
I’ll edit my original post.
- Comment on [deleted] 9 months ago:
I am not sufficiently qualified to comment on this particular sociocultural trends nor can I give medical recommendations. However, some may want to inform themselves by evaluating the current status of relevant research. A number of studies have found that greater ejaculation frequency is associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer.
One such research in question :
- Comment on Which OS do you use for your homeserver? 9 months ago:
Alpine on Pi4. LMDE on recycled AMD systems (phenoms, opterons, FM2 APUs, oh and a recently dead bulldozer fx-8150). TrueNAS, OPNsense on dedicated hardware. VMware ESXi on my older workstations (currently transitioning toward LXD/Incus and XPG-ng).
- Comment on What's the best type of food to eat in an active shower? 9 months ago:
Concentrated lemonade…? 😳
- You let it it dilute as you go, as per your taste.
A block of hard cheese…? 😆
- It would be water resistant (waterproof) enough to last the whole shower.
That is an interesting thought experiment that never occurred to me.
- Comment on Amazon could soon be on the hook for safety of third-party products it sells and ships — Government order could classify it as a distributor, potentially exposing it to more legal claims 9 months ago:
What‽ Why would such a thing exist ??? 🤔
Testing your electrical panel? and how fast the firefighters are to get to your house?
- Comment on Star Citizen Introducing a $48,000 Ship Bundle, but Only for Players Who Have Already Spent $10,000 10 months ago:
I wonder if games that require such farfetched amounts of money should be included in the Luxury tax?
A lot of those “whales” have cognitive difficulties and/or gambling addictions issues. Since many if these game developers/publishers have no qualm blindly milking and profiteering. It should be no surprise if some sort of tax is levied to help societies (à-la-tobacco or sugar tax) attenuate the ravages of gambling addictions.
Moreover, Star Citizen has been released over 10 years ago while been continually updated.
At what point is it just senseless greed that has taken over the game?
- Comment on Do any of you have that one service that just breaks constantly? I'd love to love Nextcloud, but it sure makes that difficult at times 10 months ago:
I regularly “deep freeze” or make read-only systems from Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Linux Mint LMDE and others Linux Distros whereas I disable automatic updates everywhere (except for some obvious config/network/hardware/subsystem changes I control separately).
I have had systems running 24/7 (no internet, WiFi) for 2-3 years before I got around to update/upgrade them. Almost never had an issue. I always expected some serious issues but the Linux package management and upgrade system is surprisingly robust. Obviously, I don’t install new software on a old system before updating/upgrading (learned that early on empirically).
Automatic updates are generally beneficial and helps avoid future compatibility/dependency issues on active systems with frequent user interaction.
However, on embedded/single purpose/long distance/dedicated or ephemeral application, (unsupervised) automatic updates may break how the custom/main software may interact with the platform. Causing irreversible issues with the purpose it was built for or negatively impact other parts of closed circuit systems (for example: longitudinal environmental monitoring, fauna and flora observation studies, climate monitoring stations, etc.)
Generally, any kind of update imply some level of supervision and testing, otherwise things could break silently without anyone noticing. Until a critical situation arises and everything break loose and it is too late/too demanding/too costly to try to fix or recover within a impossibly short window of time.
- Comment on HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated' 11 months ago:
With all the interest in 3D printer and large communities building their own printers, where are the amateur 2D printers? Did we just jump to 3D printing because it was cooler (which I also admit is amaizing)?
I just want a basic 2D inkjet or laser printer that doesn’t stop printing because magenta is low or doesn’t waste ink to “clean” the print head, nor make up weird errors because it doesn’t have access to the internet.
What about printers without ink? Would it be too hard/complicated to use a lower power laser (instead of a laser cutter) to burn/scorch a thin micrometric, if not nanometric, layer of normal everyday printing/copy white paper?
As a child, I remember scorching magazine/journal paper and all sorts of wood materials with my grandmother’s handheld magnifying lens under the summer sun in the yard. I was able to draw stuff without burning some of the material completely.
- Comment on ProtonMail and SimpleLogin emails will be blocked from registering on websites 11 months ago:
Every ~3 to ~5 years I change my free email addresses (gmail, hotmail/outlook, yahoo, etc.). Although, I don’t use yahoo anymore.
I have turned a few of my old gmail accounts into spam mail trawlers as I “Gotta catch ’em all! ” and every time I have to make a temporary or single use account for a service I want to check out/try or I just foresee making only a single purchase I always use a gmail account+alias if they don’t have a guest checkout option. The old gmail accounts are checked quarterly on a if-I-remember basis but at least once a year.
On first contact with any business, services or people I have never met in person I usually give a newer gmail address I check biweekly in case my forwarding filter missed something important.
Moreover, I use gmail incoming mail rules to forward copies of important keywords and specific email address to my 2 professional (redundant) emails for which I enabled notification on my phone, main desktop and workplace.
Gmail is so ubiquitous and well trusted that I can pretty much use it in any input forms for registration or verification. Their spam filter is also pretty good (not always) to skip/pre-filter obvious phishing and scam emails.
Even though I have already moved away or avoided Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, TikTok, Wechat, Temu, PayPal, Sony, etc. I occasionally still have to indirectly deals with them on a limited case-by-case but specific situations.
By excluding so many excellent email services they are inadvertently making sure that Gmail, Outlook and other allegedly “reputable” free emails services slowly become a junk/spam/marketing email dump that few would want to enable constant notification for and fewer would want to delve into and sift through daily.
Sorry, this became a long rambling rant about all the layer of protections I have to use nowadays to just avoid wasting energy and attention on the profusion of spam/useless emails.
- Comment on Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption 11 months ago:
Gosh, 🤣 … the image of having carbonized and/or partially vaporized humans quickly switched my awe in the technology into repugnance.
Darn, why does amaizing technology often end up with horrifying set backs and adverse effects?
- Comment on What Are Your Favorite Hidden Gem Android Apps with Less Than 1 Million Downloads and 4+ Star Ratings? 11 months ago:
Oh no‽
Seems like FastForward has been put on ice/abandoned by the developers/maintainers (read the project GitHub header).
Any viable/preferred alternative?
- Comment on Tech execs are reportedly 'scrambling' to score a ticket to a dinner with China's president in San Francisco 11 months ago:
Yup… and just after they are done setting up their manufacturing plant or tech hub, they will act all surprised (surprised-pikachu.jpg) when some made up excuse are fabricated to shake down their newly minted “investment” just like Several foreign businesses have been raided by the authorities. and cry how could this possibly have happened, all offended, while demanding for a bailout or a loss carryover of their future taxes.
Then there is the multitude of spying and theft: Allegations of intellectual property theft by China or through their Thousand Talents Program by offering high salaries, privileges and rewards to the chinese diaspora in various countries to bring back sensitive documents, blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data before leaving their previous workplace.
Unfortunately, China is at the crossroad of multiple extraordinary challenges it had been delaying, exacerbating or skipping for the last few decades :
- demographic collapse, whereas population over 65 will increase from 200 million today to 400 million by 2049, while the overall population will decline slightly caused by the one-child policy since 1979 but also the high cost of raising a child in China to be successful
- hundreds of entire cities of unproductive tofu dreg construction and litany of unfinished projects (roads, bridges and train lines to factories, airports and houses) causing huge insolvent debt among Chinese property developers, all amounting to a beleaguered US$55 trillion property sector, which accounts for between 22% and 29% of the Chinese economy
- numerous environmental challenges that have only accelerated, including air and water pollution, deforestation, and dealing with increasing local natural disasters (flashfloods, heatwaves, heat domes, droughts, soil erosion, desertification, typhoons, etc…) due to Climate Change
- feeding 22% of the world population with 7% (and decreasing) of their global arable land
- youth-unemployment crisis whereas millions of well-educated graduates (21,3% of jobseekers between the ages of 16 and 25) are struggling to find decent white-collar jobs in urban areas
- prevalence of corruption, nepotism, grift and extortion by every level of governance and institutions (local, city, regional, medical, education, police, etc…)
All of the above while an ongoing China-U.S. trade war.
Hence, my doubt on foreign investor’s (voluntary, well informed and rational) return into a unfriendly and drastically changed Chinese economy.
I hope I am wrong and I absolutely wish for the best for China and the everyday peoples of China currently struggling to eke out a living due a series of unfortunate natural and/or preventable human caused disasters, all amplified by a leadership prioritising ideology over effective governance, or control over pragmatism.
- Comment on Assuming a button that, every time you push it, your intelligence goes up. The obvious and sane thing to do is to push the button all day. Yes? No? Maybe? Is there something that I'm missing here? 11 months ago:
It depends on the definition of intelligence as there are many kind/type/sort/category of intelligences and every psychologist, neuroscientist, philosopher, linguist, ethnologist, educator and a multitude of other specialist will all have their own preferred way to differentiate, categorize, regroup and make hierarchies or diagrams of all matter of intelligence and the different aspects of cognition.
Then there is general intelligence (g factor or general intelligence factor) which counterintuitively affects “intelligence” less as it increases, coined as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns (SLODR):
Tucker-Drob (2009) found that a general factor accounted for approximately 75% of the variation in seven different cognitive abilities among very low IQ adults, but only accounted for approximately 30% of the variation in the abilities among very high IQ adults.
Hence, very loosely akin to current CPUs/GPUs limits (terrible comparison, I know), there’s only so much Gigahertz we can push silicon based CPUs, there is only so many transistors we can smash together into a smaller and smaller space, there is only so much distance/area to carry tiny and fragile signals from one end of the CPU to another before it become undistinguishable from background noise, there is only so much power we can feed a tiny CPU before it reaches thermal saturation and there’s only so many cores and/or modules we can add before most of it remain dormant/barely used in day to day operations.
Now, concerning your hypothetical button, let suppose there is no such “diminishing return”, one could gladly continuously sit/walk/sleep on the button for more “intelligence”, but to keep up the brain and entire nervous system will have to drastically change just to handle all this increased intelligence. At some point even the brain volume will start to be affected and the brain would outgrow its cranium. All of it will probably excruciatingly painful and accompanied with a cocktail of neurological disorders since the brain keeps rewiring itself as it evolves.
Neat question indeed. 😆
- Comment on Taking open access to the next level, by giving control to researchers, instead of to academic publishers 11 months ago:
The established publishing “vampires” such as :
RELX plc (the abomination created from merging Reed International and Elsevier)
John Wiley & Sons (another gluttonous monstrosity acquiring anything and everything on its path)
etc…
Will never let go of their grip on their oligopoly unless suitable legislation is in place forcing publicly funded research, studies, discoveries or developments to remain within the confines of public domain in perpetuity (or freely accessible national/academic archives in case of predefined sensitive research).
- Comment on Liquid Stool Post 1 year ago:
Wow, thank you for expanding my vocabulary in ways I did not imagine possible.
I did not need to know that 🤢.
- Comment on Though Bat'leths are way cooler than guns. 1 year ago:
Perhaps it may come as a surprising opinion but I have met and known a lot of great Americans that are kind and polite to a fault while knowing some Canadians that are petty warmongering ignoramus.
Nevertheless, I can understand that I probably haven’t met enough Americans from every States to have an overview of the ignoramuses that exist accross the border (beyond what is depicted, often exaggerated, in the media and memes — excepting the whole neverending Trump & Friends saga). Not that I absolutely want to meet them either, I have enough to deal with easily Facebook duped and misinformed relatives and sometimes colleagues.
I somehow felt like sharing my general experience after seeing that funny comparison of perceptions.
- Comment on Smokey's Simple Guide To Search Engine Alternatives 1 year ago:
Excellent writeup! With constant updates to boot 🥳
I’m saving it for future reference.
Thank you for putting your time and effort on this.
- Comment on But it's just banana cat videos 1 year ago:
I like the concept but I want something I can run locally (and update by myself) in a docker container or a Virtual Machine. I’m tired of online service changing their products for the worse or increasing prices because they feel like it.
- Comment on Amazon reportedly used a secret algorithm to jack up prices — A new report details Amazon’s Project Nessie pricing algorithm 1 year ago:
That’s why I micromanage my subscriptions way before the last day to edit when further change are impossible:
- I always leave at least 5 items with delivery 6 months regularly (to max out 15% rebate)
- I always keep an eye on Camel³ and Keepa, local merchants pricing and my previous orders for best price possible (as long as its not over 15% my best price I keep the subscription otherwise I reschedule it to next month, but not skip)
- I skip anything I don’t actually foresee the household needing the next 5 months
- I sometime keep items I need if and only if the best price is from Amazon compared to other local merchants (flyers, in store, online) even though its not a historical best price not even my best price
- "Skip All" if I cannot manage to get a good deal with at least 15% subscribe rebate
Usually I manage to get 7+ different items every month with additional coupons and multibuy rebates (5 for -5%, buy 3 for 6$, etc.).
Last month, surprisingly I somehow managed to combine 60+ items over 14 differents subscription orders all combined and shipped within 5 boxes (3 of them were too heavy to carry alone).
However, this month a can’t seem to find and assemble more than 2 subscription order of regular thing I actualy need. Hence, I may entirely skip November’s delivery.
On top of that, I don’t have/use Prime most of the time. I only pay 2$ for a week of prime whenever a big sale day is upcoming or that there is a exclusive prime only rebates (prime day, black friday, boxing day). Or take the free 30 days trial when available.
Prime is more of a headache for me because Amazon always tries to rush deliver the package with any courrier services they can without ever trying to combine orders. Therefore, we end up having to track multiple different deliveries through multiple different tracking service. Unfortunately, some courriers are regularly terrible at delivering.
In contrast, without Prime, orders tend to take in average over 4+ days before shipping. Enough time to usually combine 3 or more orders in 1 package. And delivered by Amazon’s own delivery truck.
- Comment on Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach 1 year ago:
These online password manager services are all half-baked scams that get away scot-free in any event of a breach (whichever the ones they just cannot silently hide away).
Only when/if they offer a minimum compensation backed by third party reputable Surety Insurance of at least US$5000 for every single breach for each compromised password/key/wallet/service for each effected customers would I even consider take a gander at their “unbreakable/unhackable” password manager service.
Until such a day arrives, I will continue to use FIDO2 hardware keys (Yubikey), asymmetric certificate pairs (gpg2, SSH, TLS, etc…) and the good old remember all my darn long passwords in my brain for symmetric ciphers (rjindael, serpent, chacha20, etc…) with the added help of Argon2id whenever implemented/available.
I sure hope companies becomes financially liable and accountable for all their privacy/security breaches unlike the last few decades of no consequence or just getting away with a negotiable fine.
- Comment on Ex-Linus Tech Tips employee alleges mistreatment and poor conditions: “no one gets a break” - Dexerto 1 year ago:
In that case, what would you consider to be a suitable “timing” then?
Is it just after a victim (children/teenagers/men/women/anyone) was verbally/physically assaulted? Within an hour? Within 24/48/72 hours? A week? A month? A year?
When is the appropriate inconvenient (in contrast to your “too convenient”) time for you?
Whether the victim feels safe or not, ready or not, supported or not, free of any retaliation or not, when is it too late for a victim to speak out or tell their story? Is 2 years already too much? How about 5 years, 10 years or 20 years?
- Comment on No More Windows! Indian Defence Services are Switching to Linux: Indian Govt offices to use Linux distribution, replacing Microsoft Windows 1 year ago:
Well, that took them long enough.
I don’t know about other governments and institutions but Windows went to shit long long ago.
I switched to Ubuntu (lubuntu or xubuntu back then) when I saw all the MetroUI shenanigans.
Since then, I have played with many kind of Linux distribution and currently settled with a mix of TrueNAS Scale, Linux Mint (cinnamon), Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu (core), NixOs and Android (mobile, tablet, nvidia shield pro).
After also switching family and relatives over to Mint or Ubuntu (the less tech savvy ones or those that did everything in the browser email/YouTube/online shopping), my life became so much easier whenever I gave them tech support. Nowadays, I almost exclusively give tech support for Linux systems for family and avoid Apple/Microsoft whenever wherever I can.
Really, windows will continue to go downhill (Microsoft account, advertising within OS, untimely updates, updates that breaks whatever whenever, the list is endless…). ChatGPT will give them a crutch but not forever.
- Comment on The most popular Chinese keyboard app which is used by more than 450 million monthly users sends every key typed to Tencent in China. 1 year ago:
Hmm…
I use AnySoftKeyboard instead of the default android keyboard or the Samsung keyboard just to preemptively avoid these kind of “issues” creeping up in the future.
Should I still be worried?
Is there a way to sandbox or scope the software keyboards to never see the network (wired ethernet, Wi-Fi, LTE, 5G or otherwise) on stock Android 13 ?
Other than:
Settings > Connections > Data Usage >
Allowed networks for apps > {app} > Wi-Fi only (and not use Wi-Fi) or Mobile data only (and not use Mobile data)
and
Mobile data usage > {app} > Allow background data usage > Disabled
Moreover, there is no “Network Permissions” setting option from what I can see even within Permission manager > Additional permissions.
- Comment on The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won. 1 year ago:
Really‽ I just checked and many of the small subreddits I used to follow became much less interesting/active if not dead.
Meanwhile, some of the bigger subs became a repost dumping ground of years old posts/images/videos/memes by fairly new accounts (i’m guessing those are bots karma farming).
The fediverse is the much better way IMHO.
In any case, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit have become too toxic to use I will keep away (though, I never had a Facebook nor a Twitter account)